Within the context of the new communication ecosystem, attitudes towards computer‐mediated discourse (CMD) practices have not been extensively investigated. This study explores social attitudes towards “Greeklish,” a specific discursive phenomenon of CMD, which involves the use of the Latin alphabet in Greek online communication. It approaches Greeklish as a glocal social practice, and investigates attitudes towards Greeklish as they are represented in the Greek press. Three main trends are identified in the corpus. The first, a retrospective trend, views Greeklish as a serious threat to the Greek language; the second, prospective trend, approaches Greeklish as a transitory phenomenon which will soon become negligible due to technological advances; the third, resistive trend, points to the negative effects of globalization and relates Greeklish to other communication and sociocultural practices. Adopting a critical discourse‐analytic perspective, this study attempts to map the discourses which permeate each one of these trends in order to reveal different, often heterogeneous and conflicting representations of Greeklish in Greek society at a specific historical moment.

No abstract

The present paper examines the pragmatic comprehension and metapragmatic awareness of academic L2 learners, as manifested in exam scripts from a written exam specifically designed to assess students' pragmatic awareness. The exam is offered to fourth semester students of the Faculty of English Studies of the University of Athens, upon the completion of an academic language course, Genres in English, which deals with various media genres of English, mainly from newspapers and magazines. Contrary to extensive studies in pragmatics and oral communication in L2 contexts, in this paper we present our attempt to raise students' pragmatic awareness through a metapragmatic analysis of written texts. In particular, we place emphasis on written discourse reception and expect our students to be able to identify pragmatically inferred effects retrieved from a text by linking parts of the text together. This approach to teaching pragmatics engages learners in a genuine reading context requesting the reader's spontaneous reaction and contribution to the process of meaning making in L2. Our research has confirmed that pragmatics can be taught in an L2 environment. More specifically, our study shows that it is possible to raise students' pragmatic awareness in an L2 academic context by teaching them how to provide a metapragmatic analysis of newspaper and magazine texts. Concerning the factors affecting students' pragmatic awareness, we would like to argue that further consolidation through practicing with the pragmatic comprehension and metapragmatic analysis of texts appears to contribute to raising students' pragmatic awareness. Finally, it can also be argued that pragmatic awareness relates to language proficiency, as, on the one hand, cases of low pragmatic awareness are shown to be students with poor English, and, on the other hand, students with a high level of language proficiency exhibit raised pragmatic awareness even when they have only had limited practice with analysing texts.

No abstract

No abstract